DocuSign Hones Marketing Strategy, Partners For Growth

On the heels of an initial public offering, DocuSign is honing its marketing and integrating its electronic signature software with a range of third-party business management systems to extend the reach of its market-leading platform.

Today, much of DocuSign’s $518 million in revenue comes from the sale of subscriptions to its cloud service, which gives its more than 370,000 customers (individuals and companies of all sizes) a fast and secure way to send, sign, manage, and store business agreements. The company also collects transaction fees for processing insurance, property-rental, and other payments. And it sells software development kits that developers use to integrate DocuSign’s e-signature and complementary offerings into their own sales, financial, HR, and other business applications.

Robin Joy, right, senior vice president of digital demand and web sales, consults with members of her team at DocuSign’s San Francisco headquarters.

As part of its efforts to grow its customer base and continue its rapid pace of expansion, DocuSign’s marketing team is using Oracle Eloqua to see exactly who the platform’s users are, understand how they’re using the platform, and then quickly prioritize how to market to them, says Robin Joy, senior vice president of digital demand and web sales.

Because DocuSign has a range of customers, from self-employed real estate agents to large global enterprises, “the key is to tailor the experience that’s right for each user,” Joy says.

The lead-scoring module of Oracle Eloqua, part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, lets Joy’s team tailor its marketing to specific customer profiles. If a customer is, say, a procurement director at a major bank or a partner in a small law firm, Joy’s team can then help those individuals find a white paper or attend a webinar tailored to their role, sector, and company size.

Oracle Eloqua’s artificial intelligence technology also lets DocuSign analyze how users went from exploring the platform’s features to buying a subscription, helping the company modify its lead-scoring algorithms “to determine the best engagement model for each type of prospect,” says Andrew Stafford, director of marketing operations.

Regulatory Compliance

Another key consideration is regulatory compliance, especially with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, due to go into effect on May 25.

“Most everything we need to comply with GDPR is natively built into Oracle Eloqua,” Stafford says. He notes that the Oracle application encrypts all of the data that’s captured from users of the DocuSign platform and then whitelists internal email addresses to allow only approved marketing staffers to access those users’ information.

For example, Oracle Eloqua’s built-in security capabilities let DocuSign’s marketers in France see only contact information for customers in France. “We can create the logic with as many permutations as we need to comply today, and then adapt the logic to comply with the laws as they change in the future,” Stafford says. “It’s an open-ended workflow.”

Maturing Market

DocuSign estimates the total addressable market for its e-signature platform to be about $25 billion, with several other vendors vying for a piece of that pie.

“This is a huge reason why we’re forging partnerships,” says Joy, who is spearheading a program with Oracle to embed DocuSign’s platform into various Oracle cloud applications. Integrating the platform with Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle HCM Cloud, for example, makes it much easier for account reps to execute sales contracts and for HR managers to get new employees to sign tax forms and non-disclosure agreements.

Sasha Banks-Louie is an Oracle brand journalist covering emerging technology and startups, as well as small and midsize businesses.